"Mark Twain. The Awful German Language (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how
far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German
newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard
that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and
parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press
without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a
very exhausted and ignorant state.
We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see
cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the
mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with
the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the
presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for
clearness among these people. For surely it is NOT clearness -- it
necessarily can't be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough to
discover that. A writer's ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal
out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a
counselor's wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so
simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still
until he jots down an inventory of the woman's dress. That is manifestly
absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and
breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and
then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the
dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.
The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by
splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an
exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive
of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable
verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and
the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the
author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is
REISTE AB -- which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a
novel and reduced to English:
"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and
sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who,
dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of
her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from
the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor
aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly
than life itself, PARTED."
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One
is sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject, and will
not be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it.
Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language,
and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, SIE, means YOU,
and it means SHE, and it means HER, and it means IT, and it means THEY, and
it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make
one word do the work of six -- and a poor little weak thing of only three
letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing
which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why,
whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a